Chapter XXIV: Dublin in 1924 201 (2)

Columns, however, that belong to a building at once assume, as well as partly dictate, the character of that building. Within limits, therefore, while belonging to the great traditional groups, they vary from building to building and age to age, but that is another and a very long story. At the present time I am convinced it would be a wise, if a self-denying, thing for architects to eschew all columns on the outside of their buildings, except for minor purposes, or in the rare event of some great national or municipal structure being entrusted to them.

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IX.

THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW STYLE.

FOLK are wont to complain that there is no modern style in architecture; nothing but reproductions of past styles. Superficially there is something in this complaint which in itself is a very old one. The Victorian historians were accustomed to call all Renaissance and post-Renaissance architecture imitative, though what in the ancient world the Renaissance palace and the Baroque church—its two most distinctive products—imitated it would be difficult to say. The Italian giants themselves, like Alberti and Palladio, while boasting that they were building in the true Roman manner made quite sure that they were not, relying, I suppose, on the ignorance of their contemporaries as to what that manner really was.

So it is with a great deal of modern work. The architect’s client may think he is getting correct Tudor, but he is certainly getting nothing of the kind. His very conditions as to content and arrangement probably preclude even the possibility of it. Still, one must admit with the greater knowledge of past styles, and especially of the Georgian ones, which exists to-day, a certain amount of clever “as you were” architecture is being built. For country and suburban houses it probably produces a better result than any “as you really are” architecture would do.

Where then is the new work and what is the new style that is as expressive of to-day as the Georgian work and style were expressive of the eighteenth century? Does the new style really exist? I think it does, or rather I think it is emerging out of the new conditions and the attempt to solve new problems. If so, it must be something more than a fashion, for a fashion is not a style. One may walk through a town to-day and date the buildings of every decade of the nineteenth century, and yet, after the first half of that century, there was no real development of style. The changes that took place from Classic to Gothic and back again with every impossible compromise between were at the dictates of fashion, but without any underlying need in the problems to be solved.

At last such a commanding need has arisen, and it is a new need. It is a need, too, which corresponds to a spiritual state, to an attitude of mind, to a way of looking at life. This being so, it is likely, in my opinion, to bring about a permanent epoch in design. It has already brought about in architecture a rough correspondence to the new forms of expression and to the simplification which has taken place in the other arts, showing thereby that it is part of a widespread movement. It was there before the war, but it has been affected and strengthened by the war.

I can best describe the new style, which I think is emerging, by saying that it is a style which relies on volume and mass for its effects rather than on surface modelling. It is seen at its best in great new buildings like the Bush Building in the Strand, in similar ones in New York and in Berlin and in Hamburg. France, if she cannot dictate to the world, remains a law to herself. Its main quality is its starkness. It is a lean style, expressive at once of economy, efficiency, and steel construction. Economy is shown in the small scale of parts, in spite of the largeness of the mass, and efficiency appears in the simplicity of the planning.

Buildings in this style rise sheer from the street, with cliff-like walls in which the windows are spaced evenly, corresponding to the ant-like use of the building by a great number of different tenants. Columns and pilasters are disappearing, except as decoration to minor portions of the structure, such as to a few doorways, or to give a frieze effect under the main cornice or roof. They no longer decorate the building as a whole as they did in Georgian times. The Georgian pretence that every building or group of buildings was a palace gives place to the modern feeling that every building is a hive of industry.

Such blocks as I am trying to describe may be blocks of offices or flats, of factories or warehouses. They express modern forms of communal existence, and arise out of the high cost of building and the need for economy in structure and in space. They satisfy us spiritually because of the directness of their expression. In contrast to Victorian and Edwardian grossness, they are clean, lean, and ascetic. Such ornament as they have is in low relief and of the utmost delicacy and refinement. The carving on the Strand front of the Bush Building is again a good example. The winning design for the great Holt Line building at Liverpool—an office building to cost £1,000,000—is in the new manner, remotely Florentine, but really modern and post-war.

Anyone who has been to America recently must have felt, apart altogether from the high buildings, that its eastern towns express in their recent structures a new and sober, if rather ruthless, outlook on life. With the extinction of the individual owner and occupier, individual modes of expression are disappearing too. Buildings there are becoming elegant, efficient machines for multiple use by a vast number of persons. They are becoming almost as similar one to the other as the various makes of motor cars. Like the cars, too, they vary chiefly in size. That is their chief defect, their varying heights—soon, however, to be corrected by the zoning law—make for discontinuity. In shape, owing to the gridiron city plan, they can vary but slightly. The total result, however, is not monotony, but a new sense of beauty and power. The isolated rectangular blocks, each catching the sun on one face, stand out as so many sentinel towers. With our continuous streets we shall never reach quite this effect, but steel construction, with its girders all at right angles to one another, and economy, calling for as much floor space combined with as little cubic space as possible, are together driving us in the same direction.

Our post-war desire for clean, honest, direct expression in all we do, with no secret diplomacy of construction or fallals of design, makes this new stark architecture something we can respect and understand. It must be remembered that starkness is in itself no bad quality. It is a quality to be found in Greek temples, in Florentine palaces, and in early Gothic naves. After the luscious, over-ripe architecture of the last twenty years, let us rather rejoice that it is again appearing in our buildings. These buildings may not represent a final stage in their own growth—they probably do not—but they do represent a very healthy reaction.

The small scale of the modern room in flat or office, with its low ceiling, compared to the large scale of the Georgian one, certainly represents a decline in value. Let us hope it is a temporary one, which will disappear in a generation or less, together with the present stringency. Spacious apartments mean spacious lives and spacious thoughts. But, at the same time, let us hope that our new cleanliness, our new freedom from worn-out shibboleths of detail and ornament, may remain, and the directness and simplicity we have won become a permanent asset of our architecture.

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X.

WHO DESTROYED OUR TOWNS?

SOME may think the obvious answer to this question is “those who covered our towns with soot.” But this is a superficial view. Wash the soot away and the shapes remain the same. My own view is that the fell deed was done unconsciously and from the highest motives by certain amiable gentlemen in the last century.

If any one wants to get some measure of the harm the Gothic Revival did and still does to our towns and villages let him visit the cities of northern Italy. There he will see how the classical tradition of simple rectangular buildings, with regularly spaced windows and low-pitched roofs, still controls all vernacular building. He will see everywhere dwelling-houses, farm-houses, factories, both new and old, which in their unaffected dignity, simplicity and repose might be the work of our own Sir Edwin Lutyens in his latest manner. Motoring across the Lombardy Plain or in the train through the hills of Tuscany one is always coming across another Lutyens house. One continually sees the buildings of Smith Square surrounded by vineyards, solid square blocks with widely and evenly spaced windows and plenty of plain wall surface. Americans in Italy must similarly have found numerous examples of the work of their great domestic architect Charles A. Platt.

Now in the eighteenth century we in England were building in the same Italian way. The square Queen Anne and Georgian houses with their regular windows and low roofs, which line the high streets of our country towns or stand as independent units surrounded with their walled gardens, are the exact counterpart of similar Italian buildings, allowing for differences in materials, such as universal stucco and pantiles in Italy and brick and generally slate or plain tiles with us, though sometimes, particularly in London, we used pantiles, too. These simple buildings, whether large or small, as one can see in Italy, always composed satisfactorily one with the other. Such buildings never jar with one another or with the landscape.

Outside Milan, a town which in size and business life compares with Manchester or Leeds, there is no rash of ugly little squiff-eyed villas with perky roofs, irregular windows and ugly projections in front and rear. Everywhere there are these simple cubical structures with regular windows, plastered and roofed as has been the tradition for centuries. Even in the centre of Milan, after walking about the town for a week, I could find only one irregular aggressive modern structure. I certainly did not find many good modern buildings, but—and this is much more important to the town as a whole—the masses of bad ones which we seem in England to take for granted were not there.

Now if the Gothic Revival had not broken up the classical tradition with us, should we still be building in town, suburb and country in the same simple way? I venture to think we should. It is appalling therefore to imagine the infinite damage that that movement of earnest but archæologically-minded men has done for us and our inheritance. We pride ourselves as a nation on our strong conservatism and common sense, but in truth we are more sentimental, more easily swept away by romantic highfalutin than any other race except the purely Teutonic ones. Ruskin simply turned us, or rather our houses, upside down. The quiet dignified old England of Rowlandson’s drawings—I refer to the houses not to the people—was changed to the speckled red and white, the pink and blue irregularly strewn crumbs of any awkward pointed shape of which Bournemouth, wholly built in Ruskinian and post-Ruskinian times, provides the supreme example.

We may laugh at modern Italian painting or cry when we compare it with the old, we may sneer at the dexterity which produces endless alabaster figures of girls in tight-fitting bathing costumes or of sentimental cupids, though we should remember that they are mostly made for the English market; but we cannot afford to look down on ordinary modern Italian building, free as it is from all eccentricity and strong as it is in its traditional way. Noticing the same good shapes and proportions everywhere in town and country alike, we see it is a real vernacular form of expression. It must be the work of folk who do it largely, if not entirely, instinctively. I doubt whether in most cases architects are employed at all. If they are, they must be almost celestial architects who are willing for the public good to sink their personalities and eccentricities in a way unknown to us.

To my argument that it was the Gothic Revival that did the damage and set us all on the wrong track, some may reply that Italian towns like Siena are full of real Gothic palaces, and yet they compose perfectly and their streets provide more beautiful scenes than any others. To this I would answer that the Italian Gothic palaces may have been built during the Gothic period, and are indeed full of Gothic detail, but they are not Gothic in spirit. They are rectangular in shape without any excrescences, bay windows and pointed roofs which show, just as the Gothic Towers of St. Gemignano are all rectangular. Gothic in Italy was never more than skin deep and was never revived as a semi-religious, semi-sociological exercise. When Italy wanted to let off steam and be romantic and exciting, as all live folk do every now and then, she invented the baroque, and a very splendid invention it was for the purpose. How much better to swagger and pose a little with some invention of your own than to fiddle about with monkish ideas five centuries old and standing for a completely different outlook on life. Anyhow the baroque never interfered with the peasants’ or citizens’ dwellings, never turned the house of the clerk from a quietly beautiful cottage into the little suburban English villa as did our own revived Gothic.

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XI.

ARCHITECTURE AND YOUTH.

THE technique of building is too complicated to allow a young man of genius to plunge into it with success unless he is specially placed to receive expert assistance. When to the technique of mere building one adds, as one must, the technique of some form of architectural expression, Classic, Gothic, Renaissance, or whatever it may be as the formula on which to base his method of design, one realises that the young architect has a long way to go before he can find himself, apart altogether from the question of obtaining commissions. The period of five years’ training laid down in the recognized Schools of Architecture as a minimum, barely suffices to give him freedom from these technical difficulties. If he is an articled pupil, content to work in the manner of his master, he may no doubt achieve an imitation of that manner in a shorter time. The building and the architectural technique, however, which he will have learnt will be merely that of his master’s particular type of building and design. If he means so to limit his range that may suffice, though with changing materials and new conditions of building something wider is obviously desirable. In the days of a settled tradition or style, part of the problem was already solved for the young designer. In no way else can one explain how a young man like John Wood could have come down from the wilds of Yorkshire and at twenty-one have designed and carried out his first, yet thoroughly mature, terraces of houses at Bath. The orders of architecture were to his hand as well as a recognised method of planning and composition, and he, like most of the 18th century architects, appears to have had little or none of the modern desire for individual expression. His originality consisted in the breadth and boldness of his schemes for his adopted city rather than in a personal outlook on his art.

The great example of the apparently untrained architect, who immediately succeeded, is Sir John Vanbrugh who built Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, and a dozen other great mansions, and eventually almost rivalled Sir Christopher Wren himself in the extent of his practice. He appears at first sight to jump into the profession of architect from that of dramatist without any preparation at all. Here, too, was a man with a very distinct individuality, whose buildings show it at every turn. The conditions under which 18th century architects worked, however, were very different from those of to-day. Vanbrugh, in connection with his own plays, may have made rough drafts for the scenery. It was hardly more than such that he needed to make for his buildings in the first instance. The complicated and exact modern working drawings, sufficient to form the basis of a contract which will stand in law, were unknown in his days. Tradesmen were accustomed to tender on very slight indications on paper of what was required. The general style of the time would be known. A gentleman’s mansion was built in such and such a way, with such and such thicknesses of walls and finishings. However, this is not enough to explain Vanbrugh. The explanation in his case is the devoted assistant architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Wren’s scholar and friend not only carried out many of Wren’s own buildings for him, but was regularly employed by Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh was the man about town, who obtained the commissions and provided first schemes, and later on, no doubt, some of the detail drawings; but Hawksmoor was the man who surmounted the constructional difficulties and saw the work to completion, supplying a great many details himself.

So it is to-day. If a man of genius like Sir Giles Gilbert Scott wins at the age of twenty-one a competition for a great cathedral, as at Liverpool, it is because he has already at his command, through family atmosphere and association as well as through his apprenticeship to a Gothic architect, the technique of Gothic architecture. Being a man of genius he can, during the slow building of the cathedral, not only learn building technique but develop his own form of Gothic expression. How great a development Scott has made in this way during the twenty years Liverpool Cathedral has been in course of erection, everyone who has seen it knows. How little experience he had of actual building when he obtained the prize, we know from his own words. When asked by a Liverpool newspaper reporter what he had built, he says he could only think of a pipe rack for which he had made a drawing, and even that was carried out by his sister with a fretsaw. His competition drawings, however, show that, from his master and from his study of Gothic work, he had already a very fair idea of the size of piers and buttresses he should use both for appearance and for strength. The rest he must have learnt as he went along—a good deal no doubt on the construction side from his first five years’ collaboration with Mr. Bodley.

Scott, though, is an exceptional case. It would be very foolish for the aspiring young architect to feel he could do with as little training, even if he has been brought up in the atmosphere of a style as Scott was. Besides, to-day he would probably have but little desire to build in any exact tradition. He would rightly be ambitious, like Scott, to give a modern meaning to his work. To do this successfully, however, does not mean that the young architect need not know and study the old work. Rather he must study it all the more to see what is essential in it, and what merely transient and belonging to its own era. In any case he cannot do without an alphabet. Certain things he will have to use to gain any expression at all, that is, unless he desires to erect but a purely engineering structure. He is sure to wish that his building should make not only an emphatic appeal to the imagination, but should have certain delicacies and refinements, that it should conjure up in the beholder certain associated ideas. To obtain such things however in a non-copying, non-traditional way implies more knowledge of the past, not less. It means much measuring of old work, much studying of proportions, both in plan and section as well as in elevation.

If, however, the young architect, to equip himself, must go through many years of strenuous training, when that has been accomplished, a glorious field of effort faces him. He will have learnt the rudiments of an art in which any work, however small, is delightful labour. To design a cottage successfully is a very happy exercise. Every piece of work which comes to hand gives scope for thought and feeling. Thought alone is not enough. That is the great charm of architecture. By thought an engineer works, an architect by thought and feeling combined. An architect may not become a rich man—he very seldom does—but, if he has the roots of the matter in him, he can never become a dull one.

Then there is always the gamble of the great competition. In no other profession can youth jump so readily to the great opportunity if he cares to try. Admittedly it is a gamble, for assessors and judges are very imperfect human beings, especially when working singly with no opposing idiosyncrasies to cancel one another. Still the great gamble sometimes comes off. E. A. Rickards was only twenty when, working with his partners, his design won the great Town Hall and Law Courts buildings at Cardiff, which for twenty-five years or more have proved themselves good and beautiful buildings as well as a winning design—not by any means, or even generally, the same thing. At twenty-eight Mr. Ralph Knott won the competition for the great London County Hall. But I do not want to dwell on the winning of competitions as the end or beginning of an architect’s career. They are the spectacular successes, but it must be confessed that very few of them have fallen to the architects who are by consent the leading artists in their profession. No, the pleasures of architecture must be the end in themselves, and to the young man who, having the right equipment, seeks them earnestly as his life’s work, there is no limit to the pleasure and interest his life will afford him.

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XII.

COLOUR IN STREET ARCHITECTURE.

THE question is always being asked why cannot we have more colour in our town buildings, and the makers of glazed tiles and terra-cotta are always replying than we can if only we would. The people, however, who seem most ready to accept definitely the invitation are the owners of kinemas and public-houses. Here, then, is a mystery; on the one hand a sincere desire for a brighter and richer architecture, and on the other the chief response from those whose business it is to satisfy only the very simplest desires and emotions.

The first question to answer is, What do we mean and hope by the word “colour”? Do we mean by it masses of elementary reds, greens, blues, and yellows, or do we mean the rich and varied tones of broken colour? If we mean the latter, and some would find in it more “colour” than in the former, the broken surface of old brickwork, the pearly greys, the rich browns and yellows of stone provide it in abundance. But if by colour we mean large solid surfaces of strong primary colours, we ought at once to pay tribute to the efforts of the publicans who, wittingly or otherwise, have in this matter been pioneers, unsung if not entirely unrewarded.

Before we proceed, however, to spread, as with a palette knife, stretches of primary colours on our street fronts, let us look at the whole canvas before us. A good third of the surface in any street scene, and more at the intersections of streets, must be given up to sky. What is its tone? Three days out of four a dull grey, and on the fourth at most a pale blue. Our masses of solid colour have, then, to be seen against a low-toned background. That is the really important factor. It is in this that our street scene differs from one in Monte Carlo, ancient Athens, or Thebes. In the brightness of the Mediterranean sun a white building, even a stone or marble one, dazzles the eye so that its form cannot be read. Colour is, therefore, necessary and agreeable, and, as everyone knows, it was used in classical times in all its primary strength. The famous frieze of low relief carving of the Parthenon was not only coloured but placed under the shadow of the deep peristyle behind a row of columns so that it might be read by light reflected from the ground. This was the only way in which its full value could be appreciated. Hence, too, the enrichment of the underside of cornices rather than of their face. When a Liverpool or Manchester sky throws down so little direct light, how much rises from a Liverpool or Manchester street? The problem, therefore, in our northern greyer latitude, of what is the happy tone of colour for our buildings (apart from the aggravation of dirt and smoke, as the country town witnesses) is altogether different. Masses of solid colour, which under a bright sky look gay and happy, with us become heavy and crude. One has only to recall the dismal entrances to the Tube railway stations in London to see that solid colours, far from having a refreshing effect, have with us just the reverse. It may be argued that the crudity would go, or at any rate be less, if the whole street were in bright primary hues. At present, among ordinary stone and brick buildings, the brightly glazed coloured building is like an enamelled iron sign on an old wall. If the whole wall were enamelled, however, there would still be the contrast with the surface of the street, unless that were enamelled too, and with the sky, which no form of sky-writing has yet been able to turn into Prussian blue and vermilion.

The quality of the colour which the ancients used on their buildings, when it was applied colour and not that of the natural material, marble, brick, or stone, was not the quality we are invited to use to-day. As far as can be judged from fragments, the quality of the colour on a Greek building was more like that of thin water-colour than thick oil colour, whereas the glazed materials of to-day are far more treacly than oil paint. Look at the glazed portions of the Midland Hotel, Manchester. They have a solid glueyness, a thick, uniform viscosity which is the very negation of life and colour. Natural materials, though they may very quickly become darker and duller in Manchester air, never become so dead as these artificial ones. The latter may indeed be washed—unwashed they hold the dirt in streaks and patches in a much less pleasant way than natural ones,—but they cannot be brought back to life, for they have never really lived. They were cast in moulds from the start, and were repeated endlessly. In the baking, too, they twisted not a little, so that there is always an uneven puffiness of surface and line. They have not the clean-cut look of stone from the chisel, or even of brickwork truly laid. It is a case of cast material in place of wrought, and of a cast material which does not cast well. This, of course, only applies to glazed and unglazed terra-cotta when used structurally to take the place of brick or stone. It is quite another thing when it is used decoratively, as the Delia Robbias used it, inset in brick, stone, or plaster. Its very irregularities then increase its decorative value. These objections, too, would not, in my mind, apply with quite the same force to a purely surface material like tiles or mosaic. The difficulty of the bright colouring against the dull sky would, of course, be there, but from the multiplicity of joints and surfaces the colour would be less solid, more broken in fact. In Portugal there are houses faced with coloured tiles which give a pleasant effect, but there again the latitude and atmosphere are different. We have yet to see a satisfactory external use of glazed materials in this country. When it does come, about which I am very doubtful, it must for good neighbourly reasons be applied to a whole street or district at once. Isolated patches like public-house fronts and Tube railway stations do the same sort of violence to adjacent buildings in natural materials that an enamelled iron sign does to a country lane when set up in a field alongside.

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XIII.

EVERYDAY ARCHITECTURE.

IF we were all fortunate enough to live in the few unspoilt English villages or country towns that are left, or if we occupied an apartment in Park-avenue or Fifth avenue, New York, or in the central part of Paris, not to mention rooms in a palace in one of the hill towns of Italy, we would understand without more ado that architecture is an everyday affair. As it is, living in Liverpool or Manchester or in a London suburb, we think of architecture, if we think of it at all, as an affair of big buildings, town halls and cathedrals, and probably now and then of banks and insurance offices. Even so, it is a mystery which a few highbrow people know all about and no one else can understand. This, of course, does not prevent us from enjoying the old villages and towns we motor through. We have long learnt, indeed, that they provide the chief interest in motoring. But that they are architecture, and that each of the little buildings we see nestling together has been consciously designed by someone, even if that someone did not call himself an architect, never occurs to us. And perhaps rightly. We are so accustomed to connect the word architecture and the man architect with our ugly over-emphasised town buildings that these modest little country ones are obviously something else. We assume that, like the trees or like Topsy, they just grew.

Herein lies a complete fallacy, which is nothing less than a tragedy. The cottages and little shops we have liked so much in our country visits, without quite knowing why, have all been the cousins, once or twice removed, of the squire’s mansion. The little village church has borne the same relationship to the cathedral in the neighbouring town. Now we know that the cathedral and the mansion house are architecture. I am afraid, therefore, that we must admit that the others are architecture too. If so, we shall come to this strange conclusion, that in the days when things were beautiful they were all architecture. Architecture indeed was an everyday thing. We might even go further and say when it ceased to be an everyday thing, when it was reserved for some theatrical make-believe, and became thereby divorced from life, it ceased to be architecture. That is why the architect should be one of the most important persons in the State, why he should be trained as for a priesthood, and when trained why he should be trusted, why indeed the whole external form of the material side of our civilisation should be moulded by him. He, and he alone, if he is properly endowed and properly trusted, has the means to make our towns beautiful again.

If our architects, however, are to be trained as priests, standing between God and the people, the life they interpret in brick and stone must be something very different from the sordid materialistic life which has followed the industrial revolution. These old villages and towns we liked were all antecedent to that revolution, and the life they interpreted, to which they still bear witness, was something very different from Victorian self-righteousness or Edwardian money-making. These latter showed themselves very plainly in the architecture they brought about. I suppose there has been no such vulgar period in our whole architectural history as the last fifty years. Individualism ran riot; restraint of every kind gave way, and our town buildings became the be-columned and be-swagged, the overdressed and under-mannered structures we know so well. Our suburbs became either the endless rows of little grinning puppy-like villas of the poor or the be-gabled flaunting sham half-timbered pressed-brick houses of the rich. And the richer we got the worse our buildings became.

Now, thank God, we are all poor again, and what do we find? Everywhere arising a leaner and cleaner architecture. The Government housing schemes, whatever they have cost (and it is only fair to say that in the majority of cases the excessive cost has not been inherent in the design), show once more the simple cottage buildings of our travels, or rather ones which exhibit an obvious relation to them. Everyone must have been struck with the new everyday architecture which has grown up on the outskirts of all our towns. Architecture and architects have been brought back to the workman’s cottage. As the workman suffered most by her neglect in the past, so rightly he is first to welcome her return. I have not yet noticed that architecture has spread to any great extent to the £1,500-£2,000 house, except in a few favoured spots. But the owner of such a house can demand her services if he wants them. He may, of course, still belong to the pre-war years of vulgar display. Some folk never learn, even by a European war. The new, lean, straightforward architecture of our own day, with no fly-blown philacteries of dead ornament, is growing nevertheless. It is to be seen already in several of our bigger new buildings. There was a beginning of it in the cliff-like walls of the Adelphi and Cunard buildings, in Liverpool, before the war. The great plain wall surfaces of the Bush building in the Strand, with their even distribution of windows, giving expression to the building’s total mass rather than to any individual feature, are in the new manner. So is the fine stark massive block the Ministry of Pensions has put up at Acton. So will be the new Holt building, Liverpool, when erected. All these, like the new Government cottages, so similar to one another in shape, express the increasingly communal aspect of modern life. Strict economy and steel construction in the case of the big buildings, strict economy and an appreciation of the value of light and air in the case of the small buildings, have together led to simpler, cleaner, more direct structures than our wealthy late Victorian and Edwardian predecessors could dream of, much less desire. May the demand for the new architecture continue to grow, and may the Schools of Architecture prove worthy of the great mission which lies before them!

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XIV.

MODERN AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.

IN the series of delightful letters Rupert Brooke sent from the States to the old _Westminster Gazette_ before the war, he placed among America’s five great achievements her modern architecture. Anyone who has visited America recently will realise that if magnificent modern architecture eight or ten years ago was one of the five finest things she had produced, this architecture has now probably reached the first place. It is very doubtful whether anything like this could be said of any other country, and certainly not of our own. With us, the last fifty years have hardly formed a great architectural epoch. This period may have been distinguished in literature, both in prose and poetry, but certainly not in the plastic arts, and least so in architecture. The last twenty have no doubt seen an advance and the last ten a proportionately greater one. The revived interest, first in old furniture and then in old buildings, which has been so remarkable a feature of these years has begun to react on our new buildings. Clients, again, have taste and are beginning to exact it from their architects in even greater measure. But any advance we have made has been nothing to that made by our so-called transatlantic cousins. Their advance in the oldest and noblest of the arts has not only been relatively greater than ours, but their absolute achievement has been immeasurably greater too. Starting with less good old work at their side—they had little more than their wooden colonial houses—they have far outstripped us in the general quality of their new. I say the general quality, for, of course, we have not been entirely without our modern architects, who as artists have upheld our ancient faculty of building beautifully, but unfortunately such artists have been the exception. No one who walks through the City of London, or along Oxford Street or New Regent Street, could maintain that the mass of our modern town buildings compares with the few old ones like Somerset House, or such of Nash’s plaster palaces as still remain to serve as a standard. On the other hand, anyone who walks down Fifth Avenue from, say, 30th Street to 70th Street passes block after block of buildings all modern and mostly built during the last twenty years, a great number of which are comparable in charm with the Italian and French palaces which have distantly inspired them. They have the same dignity and reserve which seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of most eras but our own. They are scholarly buildings too, in that there is little detail in them to worry the connoisseur in the way in which some sudden break in the line of a modern piece of furniture worries those who know the old. If the general idea of a Florentine palace is used for the façades of a modern building, as in University Club, it is used thoroughly and with knowledge; the small refinements of contrasting textures and mouldings, the massive bulk and cliff-like walls which go to make up the charm of the original finding their echo in the modern building. The building is not Florentine in the basement, Milanese in the middle stories, and Venetian at the top. I should say that the distinguishing note of modern American architecture is its scholarship. Thirty years ago some of these new buildings appeared to the general public to be almost copies of famous European ones, and the great American architect, McKim, justified this by saying that as their continent lacked the foundation of fine old buildings, such as we have got, on which to found their new, he was ready to import them. But in so saying he did himself an injustice, for his buildings, such as Tiffany’s, which are nearest to being copies of palaces in the old world, are really very far from it; while his last and those of his successors are faithful only to the spirit of the style in which they are built and not to the letter. Have not some of our own best modern buildings been produced in this way, such as the Reform Club in Pall Mall, which is based quite obviously on the Farnese Palace in Rome, but with a smaller scale to suit the smaller scale of our streets and buildings?

Apart from this question of inspiration, what are the things in American buildings in general which strike the Englishman when he first sees New York, Washington, or any of the larger Eastern Cities? I think the very first thing is their apparent solidity and simplicity. They seem made up of a few large parts rather than infinite numbers of small parts. If columns are used they are used boldly as in the Lincoln Memorial or the Temple of the Scottish rite at Washington, and are, as they should be, dominating features. If we look, too, at the general mass of an American building, we see that it is usually of some simple shape such as a rectangular mass crowned by another rectangular mass or a cube crowned by a truncated pyramid. Towers, gables, small domes, such as those with which we are accustomed to ornament so many of our buildings, are largely absent. The dome, when it is used, is used nobly to express some great central civic or governmental building like the Capitol of the State; indeed, in America the dome raised on a drum has almost come to signify this and nothing else, just as in Italy and France it was chiefly used to express the cathedral or cathedral-like church. This simplicity of mass which is so necessary, if a building is to make a strong impact on the imagination when first seen, is no doubt helped by the rectangular sites on which most American buildings are built. The scheme of cutting up the town area into rectangles by streets and avenues crossing one another at right angles, while it often leads to monotonous streets which appear to go on endlessly and have no proper beginning or end, means, however, that most buildings of any size either occupy a whole town block or have a return face on the cross street. This at once gives them a solidity of appearance which buildings with only one front to a street can never have. You notice this particularly when you first arrive in New York at the Great Central Station, itself a terminus on a scale of which we have not yet dreamt. You step out into 42nd Street and are surrounded on all sides by great creamy grey masses of building which are shooting up into the sky all round you. They are the great new hotels and apartment houses, a fresh one of which arises every few months in this district. They seem like great solid cliffs of stone and brick which have been cut with a knife into huge, simple rectangular blocks. If they were of any fussy shape or covered with turrets and gables they would be a nightmare. As it is, when once one has got over the strangeness of their size, one finds them very dignified. The streets which form the spaces between the blocks are sufficiently wide for the sun to light up one face, leaving the other in shadow, so that the full effect of their volume, as the cubist painter would say, is felt. In these cases, all the architect has to do is to emphasize their shape by decorating a group of storeys at the ground floor level to form a base to his wall, and another group at the top to form a coping leaving the middle portion plain and allowing the endless windows in it to give texture very much as the bricks with their mortar joints when properly built do with us. These hotel blocks, though, are perhaps an extreme example of simple masses. The best high buildings, however, follow the same scheme, only in this case the rectangle is stretched upwards till it becomes a square tower or campanile. When so treated and when it is well separated from other high buildings, the so-called skyscraper is a thing of great beauty. As an isolated shaft of white marble running up four or five hundred feet into the air and crowned at the top with marble balconies and pyramidical roof, like the campanile of St. Mark’s at Venice, it becomes a thing of intense and delicate beauty. Such a marble tower is that of the office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Madison Square, which alike by day and night, for it is lit up at night with floods of electric light, is a romantic and wonderful object to all the central up-town district. The high buildings at the foot of the island, while they form, as seen from the river, one of the most thrillingly romantic sights in the world, outdoing anything Albert Dürer ever imagined, spoil each other when you see them close at hand by their proximity to one another. They become a confused mass of buildings, very much in the way a series of office façades do in the City of London, only here they add to the tangle a variety of heights. The obvious lesson is that if we are to adopt in England the high building, which has spread now to many other towns in America besides New York, and to some in Canada too, we should insist that where once one high building has been built no other shall be built within a radius of, say, a quarter of a mile. In this way our modern business towns would be enlivened with a series of towers which would catch the eye in all directions, closing vistas and displacing monotony with romance, while light and air would still circulate.

Washington is a city which is not burdened with the complete square gridiron plan of other American cities. It is built on the fine scheme of a French 18th century architect and engineer, named L’Enfant, and has a number of diagonal streets radiating from the Capitol and other important points. The result is that in addition to the square blocks facing the main streets it has many terminal sites on which great public buildings have been placed, where they can be seen dominating and closing one or more vistas. Its streets therefore do not wander on endlessly and aimlessly, but lead from the Capitol to White House or to the Congressional Library—one of the worst buildings in America—or to the Great Union Railway Station into which, by a modern improvement, all railway lines converge. It has, too, the famous Mall, a stretch of grass and trees many hundred feet wide and a couple of miles long, leading from the Capitol past the great stark obelisk to Washington—the finest and simplest monument in the world—to the Greek Doric Hall recently erected in memory of Lincoln, in which the refinements of Greek marble architecture live again. Washington, however, is a special city and its buildings are largely Governmental buildings. In that sense it is not so typical of American architecture as New York, Chicago, or half a dozen other places. One may confess that one gets a little tired of its colonnaded splendours, though it contains one or two of the most striking modern classical buildings in the world, such as John Russell Pope’s great and dramatic pile for the Masons of the Scottish rite, and Paul Cret’s delicate jewel-like building for the South American Republics.

The same note of simplicity and directness, which is the general characteristic of the best American buildings in mass and exterior, is also to be seen in their interiors. A great bank or commercial house does not have for its accommodation, as so often in England, a series of small rooms more or less cut off from one another with what is little more than a waiting space for the public. Instead there is a great open hall in which is apparently carried on the whole business of the company. Across a sea of clerks’ heads you can make out in the distance, only separated from the herd, if at all, by low glass partitions, the president, the vice-presidents, and the managers of departments. The result is that a banking hall, for such it is now called, becomes a great architectural opportunity, which the leading American architects have been eager to seize upon. But here again the architecture is reserved and simple if of costly materials. As in their great railway termini, where no advertisement posters are allowed, the bankers and the business men generally have realised that a fine and dignified building is in itself the best advertisement. We are still too content in England, I think, to carry out our day’s work in office-rooms to which we would not condemn our servants in our own homes. Perhaps it is some relic of Puritanism, though I fancy it has more to do with Victorian self-righteousness, that we seem to take a pride as a nation in working in uncomfortable conditions. The American on the other hand will live in a wooden shack or a tiny apartment, but will expect the office, where he carries out his life’s work and spends most of his waking hours, to express in some way the dignity of his labour. There is a good deal, obviously, to be said for his point of view. At any rate, it is one which appeals to his architect, with the result that we do not find in America the architectural profession divided into artists who build houses and surveyors who build offices, as it might roughly be said to be divided in England. The American architect feels, as no doubt his English confrère does, that all good building is within his province; but he differs in this, that over there the best men seem to get the best of every kind of work to do whether it be ecclesiastical, commercial or domestic, and by their training, when they get it, seem equal to carrying it out.

After all, however, it is not the opportunities either of site or money which make great architecture, but the men who design it. How is it that the men who create the buildings of America are, on the whole, more successful in their bigger creations than the men over here? No one can say of the heterogeneous mass of undigested nationalities, which at present makes up the great United States, that, like the Greeks of old, they are a race of artists. Neither in literature nor in painting have they had the success they have gained in architecture and are beginning to gain in sculpture. The explanation can only be in the organisation of their work, and in that term I would include both their methods of attacking problems as well as their methods of training. Let us take their methods of attack first. The designing of buildings in America like most things on that continent seems to gain in efficiency when done on a large scale. The office of an American architect, when in fair practice, is a very different affair to the office of a similarly placed English architect. Fifty to a hundred assistants are no rare thing, while in most of the big designing groups there are anything up to half a dozen partners, or, if not so many partners, there are fully fledged architects who have seats in the office using the office machine, and in return giving their criticism and assistance when called upon. This and the fact that in the end everything down to the position of a bell-push has to be shown on American working drawings, owing to the absence of the subsidiary profession of quantity surveyors which we have in England with their strange skill in measuring alterations from the original drawings, leads to a much greater preliminary study of the building both as a whole and in detail than is possible to the English architect often working single-handed or with a couple of assistants. Contrary to what one might imagine the American architect by his training does not allow himself to be hustled by his client into making up his mind prematurely, neither does he in his turn hustle his assistants. He insists on keeping his design in a fluid state, where everything can be altered, till he is thoroughly satisfied that he has obtained the right solution to the problem. To assist him in this he has not only the criticism of his partners and assistants, but such a library of the world’s architecture as can rarely be seen in a reference library in England. Where the English architect, till recently, was content with a few photographs and plates from illustrated papers, relying on his invention for everything else, the American architect is sufficiently a scholar in his art to desire to know before he starts his drawings the best solutions to his particular problem the world has to offer. In fact, he feels as an American architect he is the rightful heir to the world’s architecture, and in his work he expresses this. When he wants to be stately and imposing, as in his great railway stations, he is Roman in his architecture; when he wants to express scholarship and refinement, as in his art galleries and museums, he is Greek or Italian; and when it is merely the domestic virtues or comforts he is dealing with, he turns for inspiration to Italian, Spanish, or Georgian prototypes. This may not be the way to produce great architecture—it obviously is not—but it produces buildings which, if inoffensive and polite as individuals, in the mass make suave and elegant cities.